Remote technical support services news: Support.com and Comcast and CyberDefender joins ranks of ISVs offering

A couple of news items from last week highlight how the consumer and SMB-oriented remote technical support services are growing. In Support.com's (NASQAQ: SPRT) quarterly earnings, they reported 165% growth in revenue from Q3 09, to $12.1 million. The company reported total 2009 revenues of $17.1 million, so their growth trajectory is quite good. Profitability, on the other hand, remains elusive. The company notes that it does not expect to be profitable in 2010, indicating that yet higher revenues will be needed to turn the corner.

One almost hidden announcement in the Q3 earnings report could bear such fruit. Support.com said that they closed a deal on October 25 with Comcast to provide technology support services. This would be among the first major U.S. cable operators to offer such a program, although others have dabbled in it. Comcast's offering, of course, comes significantly later than what major telcos such as AT&T and Verizon are offering, and even smaller operators such as CenturyLink, as well as Tier 1 operators being served by SecurityCoverage. There is no question, however, that consumers are seeking professional tech support, and remote services offer good resolution rates and a much more convenient way of connecting a customer to a support agent. In fact, we anticipate that U.S. revenues for remote tech support - including ad hoc services and subscriptions - will total about $1.7 billion by 2014.

Other companies, including Internet Security Vendors - are paying attention to this demand as well. We had CyberDefender visit our offices last week to discuss their offerings, and they have a service called LiveTech. The service mix is fairly standard for what we're seeing in remote tech support, where LiveTech agents can remotely respond to the following issues:

• Performance issues;
• Security and protection;
• Software;
• Operating systems;
• Networking; and
• Accessories.

There are some significant differences in CyberDefender's offerings, however. First, the services are only available via a $239.99 annual subscription, whereas other providers offer a mix of ad hoc and subscription services. CyberDefender indicates that consumers will find value in an offering where unlimited support is provided, as opposed to having to pay per incident or being restricted to the number of incident calls allowed in a yearly subscription. We are testing this notion in our survey Consumer Demand for Technical Support Services, where we are seeking to better quantify whether there is a distinct shift from ad hoc to subscription-based services, and to better understand the mix of services necessary to create a sense of value for a customer considering a monthly or yearly subscription. I hypothesize that persistent offerings - such as at least a montly "tune-up" service - will help create a higher sense of value for a customer who can see firsthand the performance improvement after an agent has performed things such as registry clean-up, disk defragmentation, and eradicating spyware, viruses, and other malware.

Also, all technicians are U.S. based, and they are all located in a single facility, offering them the ability to collaborate in a manner that may be more difficult with a distributed virtual workforce.

The role of ISVs in providing remote technology support is a significant trend for 2010. CyberDefender joins other ISVs in providing premium remote technical support services, including:

• AVG;
• McAfee;
• Symantec;
• Trend Micro; and
• Webroot.

Security - Beyond the PC to include smartphones and consumer electronics

Mocana is a company to which I was recently introduced. The company specializes in security for non-PC devices - including mobile, datacom, smart trid, federal, consumer, industrial and medical. The company today announced C-Series financing from Symantec. In its press release, Symantec indicated that enhancements to mobile security would be its inital thrust with the investment.

This was not Symantec's only move in the last week to strengthen its portfolio beyond the PC. On May 19, the company announced that it was acquiring VeriSign, which makes solutions to help protect online identities.

McAfee is apparently not resting in its bid to expand security beyond ant-malware protection. On Tuesday, it announced that it was acquiring Trust Digital, which has developed a mobile security platform largely used by enterprises.

We'll have a couple of sessions at the upcoming CONNECTIONS conference on "cloud media" and its impact on entertainment and services business models. As we continue to look at this subject, security will be a huge issue. I would look to these ISVs as active partipants in mobile, cloud, and consumer electronics applications.

Remote PC Support Space - News from CES

I had my eye on new entrants and updates from existing players in the remote PC support space at CES last week. We hosted a panel at our CONNECTIONS Summit at CES last week titled Digital Home Customer Support: From Troubleshooting to Upselling? The panel included representatives from Affinegy, PlumChoice, Radialpoint, support.com, and Telcordia.

Last year saw some significant changes in the digital home tech support space, with Cisco acquiring Pure Networks, Radialpoint buying HiWired's assets, and iYogi getting funding. It makes it an exciting time to be watching the space.

The CES announcements were interesting. I discovered two more remote support providers while at the show. Symantec is offering NortonLive, which is a PC tune-up service (going for around $70). GoToAssist from Citrix is a tool that companies in the CE space and independent consultants can use to provide remote support services.

After writing about Intel's vPro solution awhile back, I figured that it wouldn't be long before we would see some partnerships emerging between Intel and players in the remote PC support space. It was nice to see that first parternship come in with PlumChoice. PCs equipped with Remote PC Assist Technology can be remotely accessed and have diagnostics and troubleshooting services performed, even in certain "out-of-band" situations (like a flaky or crashed operating system). This seems that it will open up some new opporunity for remote vendors to grow and create some new businesses.